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Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Assad's Warnings Start to Ring True in Turkey

What becomes painfully clear is that Turkey's choices all mean trouble and the strong possibility of blow back. since we have actually seen how that all works out in Iraq, it is hard to blame them for been seriously hesitant in participating at all.

The fundamental problem is cultural inasmuch as it is both tribal and heirarchial and out really means out and exploited as well. Islam does nothing to change this either. Thus each faction throws up gunmen and exploiters all looking for the best chance. Joining Islam clearly does not change this at all.

Syria and Iraq have both slid back into this natural barbarian trap and are simply unable to pull out of is at all because the peacekeepers or better the peacemakers all went home.

Assad' s collapse will trigger a worse denouement in Stria because the minority faction is well armed and will keep fighting while the Sunnis are now arming up as well. It is ugly.

BEIRUT (Reuters) - When Sunni
rebels rose up against Syria's Bashar al-Assad in 2011, Turkey
reclassified its protégé as a pariah, expecting him to lose power within
months and join the autocrats of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen on the
scrap heap of the "Arab Spring".

Assad, in contrast, shielded diplomatically by Russia and with
military and financial support from Iran and its Shi’ite allies in
Lebanon's Hezbollah, warned that the fires of Syria’s sectarian war
would burn its neighbors.

For Turkey, despite the confidence of Tayyip Erdogan, elected this
summer to the presidency after 11 years as prime minister and three
straight general election victories, Assad’s warning is starting to ring
uncomfortably true.

Turkey’s foreign policy is in ruins. Its once shining image as a
Muslim democracy and regional power in the NATO alliance and at the
doors of the European Union is badly tarnished.

Amid a backlash against political Islam across the region Erdogan is
still irritating his Arab neighbors by offering himself as a Sunni
Islamist champion.

The world, meanwhile, is transfixed by the desperate siege of
Kobani, the Syrian Kurdish town just over Turkey’s border, under attack
by extremist Sunni fighters of the Islamic State (IS) who are
threatening to massacre its defenders.

Erdogan has enraged Turkey’s own Kurdish minority – about a fifth of
the population and half of all Kurds across the region – by seeming to
prefer that IS jihadis extend their territorial gains in Syria and Iraq
rather than that Kurdish insurgents consolidate local power.

The forces holding on in Kobani are part of the Democratic Union
Party (PYD), closely allied to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which
has fought a 30-year war against the Turkish state and is now holding
peace talks with Ankara.

BIG RISKS

Meanwhile, Turkish tanks stood idly by as the unequal fight raged
between the PYD and IS, while Erdogan said both groups were "terrorists"
and Kobani would soon fall. It was a public relations disaster.

It drew criticism from NATO allies in the US-led coalition, which
has bombed jihadi positions around the town in coordination with the
PYD. It also prompted Kurdish riots across south-east Turkey resulting
in more than 40 dead.

At the same time, Turkey's air force bombed PKK positions near the
Iraqi border for the first time in two years, calling into question the
2013 ceasefire declared by Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed PKK leader. PKK
commanders warned that if Turkey let Kobani fall, they would go back to
war.

Yet now that the United States has dropped arms to Kobani’s
defenders, Erdogan has been forced to relent and open a Turkish corridor
for Peshmerga fighters from Iraq to reinforce Kobani.

Turkish officials fear this will provoke reprisals in Turkey by IS,
activating networks it built during the two years the Erdogan government
allowed jihadi volunteers to cross its territory to fight in Syria.
Almost anything Turkey does now comes with big risks.

POLARIZED NATION

The polarization within Turkey along sectarian and ethnic lines -
which analysts say Erdogan has courted with his stridently Sunni tone as
communal conflict between Sunni and Shi'ite rages to Turkey’s south -
is easy to detect in the poor and deeply conservative district of Fatih
in Istanbul.

“I prefer to have IS than PKK in control of Kobani,” says Sitki, a
shopkeeper. “They are Muslims and we are Muslims. (But) we as Muslims
should be ruled by the Koran under Sharia law."

Another local shopkeeper, Nurullah, 35, broadly agreed:

“The only mistake the government has made is to open the door to
Kurdish refugees. PYD and PKK are the same, both terrorists. How do (the
Americans) have the nerve to ask us to help PYD?”

“Of course Islamic State has sympathizers here because they are wiping out the PKK,” Nurullah continued.

Nearby, a bearded Arabic-speaking man who declined to be named said
it made sense that “Turkey as a Sunni nation supports IS over the
crusaders”, a hostile reference to the US-led coalition against IS of
which Turkey looks an unwilling party.

ZERO NEIGHBORS

The increasingly overt Sunni alignment of Erdogan’s Turkey is,
paradoxically, contributing to its isolation, at a time when the United
States has won the support of the Sunni Arab powers, led by Saudi
Arabia, in the campaign against IS.

Partly, that is because Erdogan and his new prime minister Ahmet
Davutoglu, who as foreign minister was the architect of Turkey’s
eastward turn away from the EU, continue to champion the pan-Islamic
Muslim Brotherhood, ousted in Egypt last year and banned across the
Gulf.

But it is also because of Ankara’s ambivalence towards IS, which
some in Turkey’s government saw as a bulwark against its three main
regional adversaries: the Assad regime, the Shi'ite-led government in
Iraq, and the Kurds.

“Their policy is making Turkey look completely isolated”, says Hugh Pope of the International Crisis Group.

Yet there is a wide consensus that Erdogan and his Islamist Justice
and Development Party (AKP) tried and failed to take a leadership role
as the turmoil of the Arab Spring swept across the region and have ended
up by infecting Turkey’s secular republic with the sectarianism
plaguing the Levant.

"From a zero problems policy (with neighbors) to zero neighbors,”
said a headline in the leftist Evrensel newspaper in reference to the
AKP policy of entente with neighboring states.

IS FIGHTING TURKEY'S ENEMIES

Behlul Ozkan, a political scientist at Istanbul’s Marmara
University, says the Erdogan government has supported Islamist movements
in the Middle East to establish a sphere of influence and play a
leadership role.

“When the Arab Spring started, Davutoglu saw it as an opportunity
for his imperial fantasy of establishing the Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood)
belt from Tunisia to Gaza.

"They are obsessed with destroying the Assad regime. They see IS as
an opportunity for Turkey since it is fighting its enemies on three
fronts: against Baghdad’s Shi’ite-dominated leadership, against Assad,
and the PYD, which is an affiliate of the PKK.”

Soli Ozel, a prominent academic and commentator, said the Erdogan
government's initial expectation was that the Muslim Brotherhood would
come to power in Syria.

“Turkish officials believed a year and a half ago they could control
the jihadis but they played with fire. This was a policy of
sectarianism and they got into something ... they couldn’t control, and
that is why we are here”.

Other commentators and Turkish officials say Western and Arab powers
that called for Assad to be toppled but refused to give mainstream
Syrian rebels the weapons to do it are to blame for the rise of Jihadis
in the resulting vacuum.

“They (Turkish officials) bet on Assad to fall and when they lost,
instead of backing off they are doubling down,” says Hakan Altinay of
the Brookings Institution. “They are not the only culprits. The
international community is also a culprit in this affair”.

CAUGHT BETWEEN TWO FIRES

But uppermost among Ankara’s fears is the prospect that Syrian Kurds
led by the PYD -- newly legitimized by their alliance with the United
States -- will establish a new Kurdish entity on Turkey’s frontiers,
which will incite Turkey's Kurds to seek self government.

“In the realpolitik of all this, IS is fighting all the enemies of
Turkey -- the Assad regime, Iraqi Shi'ites and the Kurds -- but the
spillover effect is that it is now paying the price in terms of its
vulnerability on the Kurdish question,” says Kadri Gursel, a prominent
liberal columnist.

Cengiz Candar, veteran columnist and expert on the Kurdish issue
adds: “If Syrian Kurds are successful and establish self-rule they will
set a precedent and a model for Turkey’s Kurds, and more than 50 percent
of Kurds in the world live here”.

Turkey is thus caught between two fires: the possibility of the
PKK-led Kurdish insurgency inside Turkey reviving because of Ankara’s
policy towards the Syrian Kurds; and the risk that a more robust policy
against IS will provoke reprisal attacks that could be damage its
economy and the tourist industry that provides Turkey with around a
tenth of its income.

Internationally, one veteran Turkish diplomat fears, IS “is acting
as a catalyst legitimizing support for an independent Kurdish state not
just in Syria but in Turkey” at a time when leading powers have started
to question Turkey’s ideological and security affiliations with the
West.

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Apr 2017 - 4.1 Mil Pg Views, March 2013 - Posted my paper introducing CLOUD COSMOLOGY & NEUTRAL NEUTRINO rigorously described as the SPACE TIME PENDULUM, September 2010 I am pleased to report that my essay titled A NEW METRIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICS AND SOLVING CERTAIN HIGHER ORDERED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS' has been published in Physics Essays(AIP) and appeared in their June 2010 quarterly. 40 years ago I took an honors degree in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. My interest was Relativity and my last year there saw me complete a 900 level course under Hanno Rund on his work in relativity,as well as differential geometry(pure math) and of course analysis. I continued researching new ideas and knowledge since that time and I have prepared a book for publication titled Paradigms Shift&. I maintain my blog as a day book and research tool to retain data and record impressions and interpretations on material read. Do join my blog and receive Four items of interest daily Monday through Saturday.